The Biotech Startups Podcast 𧏠The Mayan Negotiation Secret That Built A Biotech Company | Jake Glanville Re-Release (1/4)
Dec 15, 2025
24:05
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"You don't always know at the time how something will be useful in the future, but if you keep following what fascinates you, those threads can re-synthesize into something powerful down the line."â
Weâre revisiting some of our previous episodes over the holidays this year. Our next re-release is this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, where computational immuno-engineer and serial entrepreneur Jake Glanville shares how growing up in a Mayan TzĘźutujil village in Guatemala during a civil war shaped his path into biotech. He reflects on living amid limited access to medicine, navigating personal health challenges like asthma, and witnessing how simple interventions such as deworming transformed entire communities, inspiring his commitment to developing therapeutics and vaccines.â
Jake discusses the profound influence of his grandfather, a Rocketdyne engineer who worked on the engines that sent humans to the moon, and how that legacy lowered his sense of what is "impossible" in science. Watching his parents run a hotel and restaurant gave him an education in operations, resilience, and people managementâskills that translated directly into building biotech companies. He also unpacks the negotiation lessons he absorbed from Mayan market culture, where the goal is sustainable, mutual value rather than one-time wins.â
The episode follows Jake's transition to the United States after his father's autoimmune disease diagnosis, his strategic decision to attend UC Berkeley, and how his self-taught programming background fused with population genetics to create a passion for computational immunology.
Key topics covered:
- Growing Up in Guatemala: How limited healthcare and infectious disease exposure motivated Jake's focus on medicine and immunologyâ
- Family Influences: The impact of a rocket engineer grandfather, entrepreneurial parents, and an artist mother on his scientific ambitionâ
- Entrepreneurial Mindset: Lessons in operations, problem-solving, and people management from running a restaurant in volatile conditionsâ
- Mayan Negotiation Principles: Market-born lessons in fair, relationship-focused deal-making and being "pushy smooth"â
- Berkeley and Computational Immunology: Combining molecular biology, population genetics, and programming to analyze immune diversity
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Subscribe to the Podcast:
Find Our Guest, Jacob Glanville, at these links:
Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee
Learn more about Excedr:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/
Website: https://www.excedr.com
Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin, Owned by Excedr:
Website: https://flow.page/kyojin
Resources & Articles:
Hidden Markov Models in Biology https://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/online/courses/pfam-creating-protein-families/what-are-profile-hidden-markov-models-hmms/
Guatemalan Civil War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
Companies, Universities, & People mentioned:
University of California, Berkeley: https://www.berkeley.edu/
Pfizer: https://www.pfizer.com/
Rocketdyne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne
Glenys Thomson https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenys-thomson-26961533/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:29 Growing Up in Guatemala and Grandfather's Influence
05:16 Healthcare Challenges and Early Interest in Medicine
07:23 Learning from Parents' Restaurant Business
09:43 Artistic Training and Cross-Disciplinary Thinking
10:16 Mayan Culture and Negotiation Philosophy
11:07 The Hard Mode of Hospitality Business
12:52 Meeting People and Building Relationships
14:50 The Art of Negotiation and Leadership
16:49 Learning to Say No
17:29 Decision to Attend UC Berkeley
19:56 Discovering Computational Immunology
22:58 Outro
The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science companyâfrom pre-seed to IPO.